Going into the browser settings, you’ll find various default page viewing options such as turning off images to speed up browsing, set the zoom level, screen mode, encoding proxy and search engine. Encoding wise, things are a bit limited. There are only Japanese (Shift-JIS, ISO-2022-JP, EUC-JP) and Western European encodings. Although there is support for unicode, I found some Traditional Chinese characters aren’t displayed at all on the HK Yahoo site while Korean Hangul and Simplified Chinese doesn’t display at all. In fact, if you try viewing some sites in these unsupported languages, the browser stops responding completely and you’ll have to reset your DS before you can use it again. You can get away with inputting some Traditional Chinese characters but not all of them will be recognised of course.


Browser settings let you set the default page viewing options.
Presentation is excellent with the gradient coloured, buttons along the bottom of the screen taking up minimal space. Instead of the common ‘OK’ adnd ‘Cancel’ buttons you have a simple ‘X’ and ‘O’. Clicks and button presses can be heard as you tap the URL button, links on websites or the keyboard and, you can also hear the familiar tinkling sound when the browser first connected to a Wi-Fi connection.

Overall, while the Nintendo Browser won’t be as good as surfing the net on broadband enabled laptop or home computer, it does have its advantages. It boots up instantly, easier to carry around and will probably last longer on battery power too! Even though browsing can be a little slow, the browser still works great for looking up on the latest news, posting on a forum, checking your e-mail and many other things that you would normally do on a full sized computer. However, if you can’t get away from heavily plugin enabled sites, ones that make use of Flash such as Youtube or, like to save a lot of files from the internet then the Nintendo Browser isn’t for you.


You shouldn’t find yourself stuck at all with this Japanese version of the Nintendo Browser as everything is pretty much self-explanatory apart from the settings. Even so, the browser is still fully useable without tinkering with them and if ever do want to change the settings, translations can be found easily if you go search for them. Configuring new Wi-Fi settings shouldn’t be a problem either as you can just swap in a Wi-Fi enabled game such as Mario Kart to get it all configured before using the browser..

• Instant boot.
  
• Versatile, easy to carry around with you than even a light-weight laptop.
  
• Interface makes navigating sites easy.
  
• Majority of sites work flawlessly.
  
• Inputting text can be done quickly and easily via the soft keyboard.

• Limited language support.
  
• Doesn’t work with all Wi-Fi spots.